It is common nowadays to add a cover to your mobile phone, both for protection and esthetical reasons. They are available in many different stores including the mobile operator branded stores. The material and form varies considerably from one cover to another. You can get everything from plastic and rubber covers to silicon or metal. Of course the different materials have pros and cons. Some are more protective, even against the delivery of data. The question that follows is; how does a cover affect the performance of the antenna?

For the last couple of decades, reverberation technology was solely used as a tool for engineers specializing in electromagnetic compliance (EMC) testing. Bluetest innovations have transformed this technology into a powerful solution tuned to the needs of current wireless developers. They are the next generation of over-the-air (OTA) test systems that bridge the testing gap between conducted and drive test methods.

Multipath fading has for many years been a problem for mobile communication engineers, to be overcome by designing systems that have sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) margins. The fading is caused by multiple reflections in walls and ceilings (indoors) or cars and buildings (outdoors) that add constructively or destructively at the location of the terminal or base station antennas.

Base stations and/or terminals with multi-antenna configurations are expected to significantly contribute to much higher bit rates in mobile broadband systems. Higher bit rates using multi-antenna systems can, when there is rich scattering in the communication channel, be achieved 1) by increasing the modulation rate and/or reducing the coding rate as the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is increased through the use of diversity combining, or 2) through the use of simultaneous partially uncorrelated communication channels (Multiple Input Multiple Output, MIMO).

A reverberation chamber is ideally suited for testing antennas for multi-antenna technologies such as diversity and MIMO. Bluetest Flow for diversity and MIMO measurements are well-proven and will give you instant feedback of the performance of the antenna array after the measurement is finished - no waiting time needed! In combination with the extreme measurement speed, the user will have the antenna performance in a single minute only.

The current trend in active device over-the-air (OTA) testing is to characterize the system performance via data throughput. With Bluetest measurement software the throughput can be measured at either IP or MAC layer in a fast, repeatable, and convenient way.